I dunno, it seems to be one of those ideas in the zeitgeist : modern sedentary society is bad, which has its roots in ancient agricultural society, therefore agriculture was always A Bad Thing. I remain unconvinced. With agriculture, you don't have to leave your parents to die off in the wilderness when they can't follow the tribe. Surely that's a pretty good thing?
I don't think herders should be idolized in comparison either. In one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, I don't remember which one, there's a chapter on the fact that people from pastoral cultures are more prone to violence and are vindictive little motherfuckers (I am paraphrasing here). If a single head of cattle is worth much more than say, a tomato, and that your movable goods are literally moving around, it makes sense to be sanguine about protecting your property. Heck, look at "cowboys", it's literally in the name. Cowboy history is always about family feuds, cattle wars, lawlessness, etc. It's the whole mythos!
Whoa, caught this one late. You're not wrong: the malcontents of any society are prone to romanticizing alternative ways of life. If we're hearing more and more people grumbling about how they're rather be homesteaders, citing articles about how medieval serfs had more free time than modern wage-laborers, and pointing to the agricultural revolution as the point where it all went wrong forevermore, it *might* say something about the tendency of our present way of life to breed malcontents. We can speculate as to why that might be.
Maybe they'd all change their tune if they all spent a few years following goats and sheep around the steppes of Asia with their extended families. Maybe at least a few of them wouldn't want to come back. Who knows? At any rate, it's easier to find fault with the world we've got than to think critically of the one that got away.
I dunno, it seems to be one of those ideas in the zeitgeist : modern sedentary society is bad, which has its roots in ancient agricultural society, therefore agriculture was always A Bad Thing. I remain unconvinced. With agriculture, you don't have to leave your parents to die off in the wilderness when they can't follow the tribe. Surely that's a pretty good thing?
I don't think herders should be idolized in comparison either. In one of Malcolm Gladwell's books, I don't remember which one, there's a chapter on the fact that people from pastoral cultures are more prone to violence and are vindictive little motherfuckers (I am paraphrasing here). If a single head of cattle is worth much more than say, a tomato, and that your movable goods are literally moving around, it makes sense to be sanguine about protecting your property. Heck, look at "cowboys", it's literally in the name. Cowboy history is always about family feuds, cattle wars, lawlessness, etc. It's the whole mythos!
Whoa, caught this one late. You're not wrong: the malcontents of any society are prone to romanticizing alternative ways of life. If we're hearing more and more people grumbling about how they're rather be homesteaders, citing articles about how medieval serfs had more free time than modern wage-laborers, and pointing to the agricultural revolution as the point where it all went wrong forevermore, it *might* say something about the tendency of our present way of life to breed malcontents. We can speculate as to why that might be.
Maybe they'd all change their tune if they all spent a few years following goats and sheep around the steppes of Asia with their extended families. Maybe at least a few of them wouldn't want to come back. Who knows? At any rate, it's easier to find fault with the world we've got than to think critically of the one that got away.